Going it alone only goes so far

Stymied by Republicans, an exasperated President Barack Obama told the nation he would go it alone and use his executive authority to get things done.

“We can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job,” he said in Las Vegas in October. “Where they won’t act, I will.”

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But five months and almost three dozen announcements later, a closer look at the We Can’t Wait program shows just how hamstrung the president has been in acting on his own to provide expansive or quick relief to struggling Americans.

Some initiatives involve little more than a new website, a pilot program or a brochure. Others are basically repackaged announcements of programs already well under way. Yet others are works in progress, waiting on the government bureaucracy to catch up with the urgency of Obama’s “we can’t wait” mantra.

Among the actions:

• Obama blamed Republicans for blocking education reform and declared in November that the administration would “take matters into our hands” and overhaul the rules for funding Head Start. Left unsaid at Obama’s event in Philadelphia: He was implementing a law that Congress had already passed on a bipartisan basis — nearly five years earlier.

• The administration announced in October a one-stop website where businesses can access federal programs, and a bare-bones version of BusinessUSA.gov formally launched in February. But the Small Business Administration now says it needs $6 million to develop and market the site.

• Obama announced in December that he would extend minimum wage and overtime protections to certain health care workers. But relief may still be months off: It can’t be implemented until the government finishes the rule-writing process.

• The White House made a major push in early January to highlight “insourcing” with Obama hosting a forum and announcing steps that encourage companies to bring jobs back to the U.S. What that entailed: a brochure on how small businesses can tap into a loan program, a joint cable from the Commerce and State Departments announcing a partnership to promote U.S. investment and field-based training for staff in key foreign markets. The more consequential steps, such as new tax incentives, show no signs of passing Congress any time soon.

• The White House launched Ethics.gov this month under the We Can’t Wait banner. But the effort, which brought together seven databases already available on the Internet, was just as much about fulfilling a campaign pledge from 2008 to create a centralized Web platform for ethics data.

Obama never claimed the We Can’t Wait push is a substitute for persuading Congress to pass more sweeping legislation.